Hello, I have a large video file, about 16 gigs, that is nevertheless fairly middling quality due to source material. Standard 720x480. I was wondering if burning to Blu Ray rather than DVD would preserve some of the quality rather than diminishing it still further, or whether that would be futile (I have never authored a Blu Ray before but have the necessary equipment).

Hello, I have a large video file, about 16 gigs, that is nevertheless fairly middling quality due to source material. Standard 720x480. I was wondering if burning to Blu Ray rather than DVD would preserve some of the quality rather than diminishing it still further, or whether that would be futile (I have never authored a Blu Ray before but have the necessary equipment).

Thank you.

Look at VideoHelp's "What is Blu-Ray" to find out if your SD video and audio meets the requirements for authoring to Blu-Ray. Some Blu-Ray players also play video files burned as data. If you have a player that supports your audio and video and its container, that is easier than authoring, and less expensive if the few freeware options don't have the features you want and you need to buy software.

Assuming your video AND audio are already in formats that BluRay supports, you could use tsmuxer to author a BluRay straight from the source without conversion. Again, this assumes that your source file is MPEG-2, VC-1 or H.264 video and some Dolby or DTS variation on the audio. I have no idea why, but the "geniuses" that came up with the BluRay spec made some strange decisions for how SD material is supported. Almost certainly your source file won't have a frame rate that the spec technically requires, but tsmuxer can make a BluRay for you anyway and generally speaking the vast majority of BluRay players will play such a disc even if it is a little bit off from what the spec requires. But if you're dealing with AAC or MP3 audio and maybe Xvid/Divx video then you've got major conversion to do first.

Assuming your video AND audio are already in formats that BluRay supports, you could use tsmuxer to author a BluRay straight from the source without conversion. Again, this assumes that your source file is MPEG-2, VC-1 or H.264 video and some Dolby or DTS variation on the audio. I have no idea why, but the "geniuses" that came up with the BluRay spec made some strange decisions for how SD material is supported. Almost certainly your source file won't have a frame rate that the spec technically requires, but tsmuxer can make a BluRay for you anyway and generally speaking the vast majority of BluRay players will play such a disc even if it is a little bit off from what the spec requires. But if you're dealing with AAC or MP3 audio and maybe Xvid/Divx video then you've got major conversion to do first.

Thanks Jman. If I recall the video is encoded H.264. I guess I'm just wondering if the quality will actually be better than a DVD. As I understand it, BR allows for much less compression?

I guess I'm just wondering if the quality will actually be better than a DVD.

How could it be better? Did you read the link to which usually_quiet pointed you? Again, if your material is already Blu-Ray compliant and just needs authoring, the quality will be the same. If it needs reencoding, the resulting quality will be worse.

Better? If it's 720x480 and 29.97fps, the "quality" will ultimately depend upon the bitrate. Since you have used h.264, you have more "quality per bitrate" going for it than would have been for MPEG2 (which is what DVD requires). However, if your material WAS originally DVD material, as h.264 content now, it clearly has gone through a generation of loss. So better is relative.

If those are your only assets, and they're BD compliant (even if they weren't strictly DVD-compliant), then yes you could just author and burn, or you could just copy the files to the disc as data. The first takes some extra time & energy and has restrictions, but is more "universally compatible". The second is simple and straightforward, but has more compatibility issues (especially down the road).

obviously the OP means that if it's currently 16gb in size and he were to trasncode it to within dvd legal sizes, then yes, the quality would be reduced thus if he wants to maintain quality he should keep it at its current size, assuming the audio and video are BD legal spec since bluray does support 720x480, iirc.

Yes, blu-ray fully supports the SD spec, and H.264, but that doesn't mean every SD H.264 video will be compliant. It needs a certain resolution, fps, and needs to be encoded (at least fakely) interlaced. Furthermore, certain features of the H.264 standard need to be in place, like an amount of multiple reference frames, a strict b-pyramid, etc.

You can remux it and hope it works with, say, tsMuxeR, and many players will be lenient, but you're playing the x-factor if you want universal compatibility.

If you decide to re-encode, either DvD or BD compliance will not produce better quality than the other. The only real difference is that DvD needs MPEG-2, which requires more bitrate than H.264. But both H.264 and MPEG-2 are lossy formats, so you will lose quality regardless in the re-encoding process. If you re-encode, keep the Source.